Autobiography, biography and fiction mingle in Alice Munro's delve into family history. Beginning with the Laidlaws' - Munro's paternal ancestors - tortuous journey from Scotland to Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, it continues with her parents' short-lived success as fur trappers in Depression-era Ontario, and her own formative years in 1940s and 50s Canada. Ten-year-old Andrew Laidlaw's first sighting of "America" (in fact the adjacent area of Fife) from Edinburgh's Castle Rock becomes part of folklore, and on his later sea crossing to Newfoundland he carries an internal baggage of decades-old hearsay and myth. Munro's snapshots touch on the arduous lives of these early settlers in a country that is almost as inhospitable as the one they left behind. In an excavation as much emotional as genealogical Munro marvels at how, following this tumultuous start, subsequent generations cultivated comparatively unremarkable lives. It is perhaps for this reason that her wholly authentic re-imaginings of the pioneering Laidlaws comprise the most memorable passages in the book.Catherine Taylor

Mothers and Sonsby Colm Toibin (Picador, £7.99)

Set mostly in Ireland, this collection of short stories focuses with intense sympathy on catalytic shifts between mothers and sons. In "The Name of the Game" a debt-burdened widow in a small town works ceaselessly to ensure a better life for her children; yet her son interprets their planned move to Dublin as betrayal, not opportunity. A teenager resurrects his mother's obsolete musical recordings in "Famous Blue Raincoat" - oblivious to her traumatised reaction. Fergus's distress at his mother's death manifests itself in a feast of hedonism and deep comradeship in "Three Friends". The final piece, "The Long Winter", is an outstanding novella set in the remote mountainous Spanish landscape featured in The South, Tóibín's first novel. An insular farming family - one son, Miquel, at home, the other doing military service - is shattered when its mainstay, the mother, disappears one afternoon after a row. Over a hostile winter Miquel and his father's fruitless search evolves into a numbed - and, through Miquel's relationship with a younger man, almost compensatory - acceptance that their "loving source" has gone. A restrained, absorbing collection. CT

The Raw Shark Textsby Steven Hall (Canongate, £7.99)

You've seen the films (Jaws, The Matrix, Memento), now you can buy the book: this is a multi-sequel, or multi-tribute, to the philosophical killer-flick. Eric Sanderson wakes up one day with no memory. Soon he's receiving mementos from his pre-amnesiac self. But the tragedy of his dead girlfriend gives way to Jaws/Matrix when a giant but purely "conceptual" shark ripples scarily up through the floor of reality to snack on his remaining brain. He abandons his psychotherapist for an obscure psycho-geographical quest: searching city subways for clues to the location of his possible saviour, "Unspace" expert Dr Trey Fidorus. The clues are mainly discarded texts and graffiti, niftily rendered on the page in thumbnails that create sinisterly fishy pictures. It makes a very savvy flick-book (literally - the best stylistic joke comes when you flick through pages of thumb-nails for jerky footage of the shark's approach). But the structure, nonsensical plot and a "love" story expressed solely through chippy flirting are movie imports that detract from the novel's smartness - though not its appeal as a techno Wizard of Oz for kidults. Caroline Miller

In 1940, a Spanish militant and a fleeing German-Jewish scholar met briefly in a mountain pass. The scholar, soon to commit suicide in the mistaken belief that the Nazis had caught up with him, was Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's posthumously published The Arcades Project is part of a paper trail of drafts, revisions, travel visas and desperate letters to friends through which Bruno Arpaia's novel follows the more historically documented of its two heroes. Arpaia's tribute is deeply researched and delicately angled - a fitting memorial to Benjamin. What makes it a satisfying novel is the story of its other protagonist, reluctant soldier Laureano Mahojo, whose courageous and death-defying escape from war-torn Europe has all the blood, guts, sex and humour that Benjamin, in his cerebral isolation, lacks. By juxtaposing the heedless but heartfelt man of action and the rarefied but revolutionary thinker, Arpaia heightens the tragedy and the irony of their situation: the one survives but cannot understand his times; the other living on only through the work he described as "the theatre of all my struggle". CM

Notes for a War Storyby Gipi, translated by Spectrum (First Second Press, £9.99)

This tense graphic novel, drawn in a palette of ghostly muted greens, depicts a fictional civil war, an Italian extension of the Balkan conflicts. The villages in the valleys seem to be sleeping and wounded, Gipi writes, "like after a drunken brawl". Giuliano is a kid in his late teens from a decent family who is now choosing to slum it with Christian, an optimistic orphan, and a sallow-faced troublemaker fittingly known as Little Killer. Their transient existence is given purpose when they fall in with a local militiaman, Felix, who dispatches them on a series of increasingly dangerous missions. The war is always just out of view, a threatening presence whose corrosive effect provides Gipi with an environment to explore the trio's descent as well as their growing familiarity with the language of militia violence. Gipi is a master of portraiture, of stubbly hair and beakish noses. His sharp lines change the boys' faces from innocence to the hardened look of killers. He shows that lives in a failed state, fictional or otherwise, are worth recording and that serious graphic novels should continue to venture into this brutal territory. Craig Taylor